How much does monthly recycling contribute to the environment?
I planned on starting to recycle every day items (cans, paper, bottles, etc) around my house instead of being wasteful and throwing them away. This was just so I could feel like I was helping the environment out a little bit. However, I wanted to know just how useful one person’s monthly recyclables are to helping the environment. Like 2 full garbage bags worth per month.
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The obvious answer is…it depends. It depends how much of what item you’re recycling.
Recycling plastic is arguably the most important recycling you can do in terms of environmental impact because plastics are not biodegradable. They never decompose. Furthermore, plastics are petroleum-based–they come from the same raw materials we use for fuel.
Recycling plastic has at least three benefits: It keeps non-biodegradable materials out of landfills and waterways, it provides already-existing materials for packaging, and it reduces the amount of raw materials extracted from the ground.
Having said that, EVERYTHING you recycle has a large positive impact on the environment. Even just a month’s worth!
You answered your own question :)
Two full garbage bags worth of stuff to be recycled means it is not going in a landfill, and is being reprocessed so we can use it again!
Two garbage bags a month is 24 garbage bags a year… times however many years you do it… that’s a lot of stuff saved from cluttering a trash dump!
If everyone tried to recycle some, there would be more need for jobs in the recycling industry to handle the extra stuff. Therefore recycling would help create jobs.
It looks like a win-win situation :D
First find out where your local recycling plant takes your stuff* Because some of them believe it or not are sporting them off to China if you can believe it from CA yet! Jez!!!
Anyway, the stuff you take there is put into an original form of some type and remade into something eventually- basically. There is a lot to this you can look it up on the dot com if you have the time or are interested
Oh! Also some of the paper you recycle can be used as organic fertilizer too.
we have recently started recycling, we used to throw six bags a month, now we are down to 3.
So we hacve decreased the rubbish going to landfill by 50%, and it was easy.
When you are shopping try to buy stuff in packaging that can be recycled, plastics can be a right nusense for this.
MIT has recycled for many years. An expanded recycling program is underway to enhance our effort. Desk-side and common area paper recycling was expanded from white paper only to mixed paper, newspaper, magazines and cardboard. Large numbers of new recycling bins have been placed beside trash bins in campus common areas indoors for collecting mixed paper and commingled recyclables and outdoors for collecting commingled recyclables.
MIT has increased the monthly recycling rates from 10.5% to a peak rate of over 35%. These rate are a percentage of the total tonnage of materials recycled compared to the total amount discarded. MIT recycled 993 tons of materials in 2001 and is on course to surpass this total substantially in 2005. In addition, a food scrap composting project is operating in several dining rooms and continues to expand. MIT is composting an average of 20 tons of food preparation scraps monthly.
Also included in the recycling program is scrap metals, wood, electronic equipment, cathode ray tubes, composted yard wastes and baled corrugated cardboard. MIT is continuously working to expand the recycling program to include other difficult to manage wastes. For example, in 2001 the Department of Housing recycled 198 discarded mattresses from student housing. Another area of expansion is the recycling of construction and demolition debris that began with the demolition of buildings E10 and E20 in which 4,519 tons of demolition materials were recycled. This project has set a standard to incorporate recycling in future construction and demolition projects at MIT and will also have a significant impact on the recycling tonnage generated.
there are lots of great answers already, but i wanted to bring up the two other R’s in the in the reduce, reuse, recycle trifecta.
you should recycle whatever you can. the thing is recycling, transport and manufacturing of those things also uses a lot of energy and generates pollution as well. i’m very big on recycling because it’s a much better solution than filling up landfills. my numbero uno in terms of my environmental impact is “reduce.” i try to get less stuff that i need to throw out or recycle. i also follow the other R and “reuse” whatever i can (i.e. i use empty margarine tubs to store other food).
the other two Rs can also save some money — like if you buy from the bulk section with a container you brought from home, it costs less and makes no waste at all!
good luck with all your R’s!
It does not help tremendously but it does make a great difference compared to others who do not recycle. I would encourage others to do the same and before you know it, a whole community is helping out the enviornment.
No where near what these nut jobs tell you. Don’t bother!